German politician sues, unsues Wikipedia over Nazi symbols

The deputy chairman of a German political party filed a criminal complaint …

A deputy chairman of the German Left party (known as Die Linke) has filed a criminal complaint over the presence of certain Nazi symbols in Wikipedia. After her own party refused to support her, Katina Schubert has now pulled her complaint, apologized, and pledged to work on the issue in a different, more productive way.

The use of Nazi symbols is restricted under German law. They can be used for art and education, but little else. One might expect that their presence in an online encyclopedia would count, in a rather obvious way, as educational use, but Schubert argues that Wikipedia makes the symbols too easy to use because the images can be downloaded and converted without problems.

Nazi symbols in Wikipedia (even the English version) include a disclaimer (example) warning they might be illegal in "Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, France, Brazil, and other countries." The disclaimer goes on to note that the images are used explicitly for "purposes of education and information."

Schubert's move, which apparently came without consulting Wikimedia Deutschland, met with instant disapproval within her own party. "Katina Schubert fails to grasp the self-regulating mechanisms that work in Wikipedia," Heiko Hilker, a Left party politician, told Reuters. "Right-wing extremism on the World Wide Web cannot be tackled via national criminal proceedings."

Schubert pulled her complaint this morning, but generally defended her actions in a posting (German) to the main Left part web site. Calling the issue a "gray area" (Grauzone), Schubert outlined her view that online communities should adopt "a kind of honor code that excludes anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, and extreme right positions."

She did acknowledge that a criminal complaint wasn't the right way to deal with the issue, but she remains concerned about easy access to Nazi images on the Internet.